


When We Got Here (We Were Young Men)

by roaroftheninth



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 19:38:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roaroftheninth/pseuds/roaroftheninth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I actually got your entire name tattooed on my jaw line," Eduardo says, deadpan. "It's sort of uneven because there are so many letters in 'Zuckerberg' - " || These are three separate pieces that I wrote, but I put them together when I noticed they sort of work chronologically. This is Mark and Eduardo's life together after they make up, and I must warn you, it is flufftastic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Got Here (We Were Young Men)

**Part I - In Which Eduardo Has Inexplicably Acquired a Beard**  


"What are you - what is this." Mark looks intent and sounds faintly alarmed, which is an unusually strong reaction from him since Eduardo has done nothing to earn it (that he can recall).  
  
"What is what?" Eduardo ventures.  
  
Mark folds his arms. "I go to China for a week -  _a week_  - and I come back and see that you have allowed a small, possibly dead animal to become suctioned to your face."  
  
"Ah." This is about the beard. Eduardo might have known. "I started growing it before you left, you know."  
  
"No," Mark responds implacably. "You had some scruff when I left, it was acceptable. I still thought it was a little bit outlandish for a thirty-year-old man but if either of us is going to have an early midlife crisis, it's you. When did this -  _this_  happen?" He indicates Eduardo's beard, looking perplexed (Eduardo tries not to throw the word 'adorably' in front of that).   
  
"I'm Jewish with a side of extra-hairy Brazilian, I can grow a beard in, like, an hour and a half," Eduardo replies, amused.   
  
"Ungrow it." Mark glowers like the beard has personally offended him.  
  
"No," Eduardo replies, good-natured. "I like it. It's something new."  
  
"Well, I could say the same thing about getting a face tattoo but that still wouldn't make it a good idea," Mark counters.  
  
"I think you  _should_  get a face tattoo," Eduardo says, smiling a little in that way he does when his eyes crinkle at the corners.  
  
"There will be no face tattoo," Mark answers stiffly.  
  
"Because then you'd have to grow a beard to cover it," Eduardo agrees.  
  
"That's not what you did." Mark means it as a question. He sounds alarmed.  
  
"I actually got your entire name tattooed on my jaw line," Eduardo says, deadpan. "It's sort of uneven because there are so many letters in 'Zuckerberg' - "  
  
He starts to laugh at the way Mark's eyebrows draw together.  
  
"I'm going to shave you when you're sleeping," Mark promises, sidestepping Eduardo to get into his study.  
  
"Oh, I don't sleep anymore," Eduardo says, grinning as he expressly moves into Mark's personal space, trying to rub his furry face against Mark's. "It's my beard, you know. I like to stay up, stroking it."  
  
"Creep," Mark says lightly, ducking away.  
  
"You like it," Eduardo answers cheerfully.  
  
Mark doesn't really acknowledge that, but as he sits down at his desk, there is maybe a tiny tug of a smile.

 

**Part II - In Which Mark and Eduardo Help Their Daughter Through Her First Heartbreak**  


Mark comes home from work earlier nowadays. In the past twenty years, Facebook has grown and evolved and become something that is magnificent, yes, and far beyond Mark's original expectations, but it is also largely self-sustaining. He still spends Saturdays at the office and he'll code from home, if he's set himself a project deadline, but he is not Facebook's living, breathing heart anymore. He has other projects on the side that require his attention, not to mention a sixteen-year-old daughter (who is a full-time project in her own right), and he has found a pace that he likes for his life, a pace that allows him down-time with Eduardo and Violet that doesn't make him feel like he should be working.  
  
Tonight, like most nights, he is sitting in the living room with his laptop open on his knees. He has a desk with an ergonomic chair (purchased at Eduardo's insistence) but he likes the couch. Generally Eduardo sits on the other end of it and reads the business section of the newspaper, and they sort of just  _are_ , relaxing in each other's company even when they aren't really talking.   
  
Tonight, however, is Wednesday, and Wednesdays are what Mark likes to term Eduardo's Day of Choice for Making Unnecessary Noise and Disrupting Everything. Eduardo prefers to call it his housework day.  
  
It's not that Mark doesn't do housework, really; it's more that he can't see what's wrong with not dusting the door-frames or rotating the mattresses. Whenever he takes it into his mind to help Eduardo with the chores, he can't help but start to question  _why_  they do certain things, and in the end Eduardo always abruptly tells him to take a walk before he loses patience.  
  
So Eduardo is in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher and singing something cheerful but grating in Portuguese while Mark types away in the living room, his reading glasses balanced on the edge of his nose. The sound of the front door slamming very suddenly disrupts the rhythm of things, and Mark can hear the clatter of dishes in the kitchen as Eduardo hurriedly puts something down on the counter.  
  
"Vi? I thought you were out with - "  
  
"Don't even. Do  _not_." They can hear Violet fling open the door to the hall closet like it has personally wronged her, and then the absurdly incongruous silence that follows as she hangs her coat neatly on a hanger so that it will not get wrinkled.  
  
She is Mark's biological daughter, but in so many ways she is just like Eduardo.   
  
When she comes into the living room, Violet's corkscrew curls are hanging in her eyes, and she looks murderous. Mark shuts his laptop and carefully tucks it away. (In so many ways, she is _just_  like Eduardo.)  
  
"I didn't do anything embarrassing today," Mark says automatically.  
  
Violet gives him a look. "I doubt that." She flings herself down on the couch. "But I'm not mad at you."  
  
Eduardo joins them then, and perches on the arm of the couch. It's him - it has always been him, Violet's second dad, her  _pai_  - who can bring out the sadness that is fueling her anger. She reacts like Mark does to most unpleasant things; initially, she is angry and indignant and self-righteous. Then she hears Eduardo's voice and it brings tears to her eyes, like suddenly there is a safe place to cry and the reaction will only ever be sympathy and love.  
  
Mark would be scornful if it weren't so completely heartwarming.  
  
Which is, like. Completely  _ridiculous_. But maybe Mark is housebroken, who even knows.  
  
\--

He always remembers back when he'd ended up with Violet, after a night that had been a mistake with a women he didn't even know during the depositions. He'd been angry with Eduardo; nine months later, he'd had a daughter whose mother had promptly pulled a vanishing act. When he and Eduardo had eventually sorted things out, they'd decided to look into a sibling for Violet. Eduardo had always wanted children.  
  
The news that he couldn't have any had prompted jokes about  _shooting blanks_  and  _the universe just wants to stop my father from babysitting grandchildren_. But Eduardo had cried about it, late at night when he'd thought Mark was asleep, and they've never talked again about giving Violet any siblings.  
  
Mark supposes now that this is just as well, given the way Eduardo utterly spoils Violet. He spent her childhood making up songs for her and taking her out of school to visit the planetarium or the zoo and driving her friends around. Just now he has moved next to her on the couch to comfort her and created a kind of parent sandwich, of which Mark is one reluctant half. Most parents, Mark thinks, would feel obliged to participate in the discussion at this point, but Mark thinks that they're all better off if he sits back and shuts up.  
  
"Tell me what happened, lovely," Eduardo says, because unlike Mark, he  _will_  simply walk into the Mordor that is Violet's teenage emotional state.  
  
Violet frowns, and her eyes are unwillingly wet, like she would will away the tears if she could. "Jon took it back."  
  
Mark doesn't follow this statement at all, but Eduardo seems to, because he winces in sympathy and outrage on her behalf. "What he said three nights ago?"  
  
" _Yes,_  pai, obviously." Violet smears the back of her hand across her eyes, leaving a streak of mascara on her cheekbone.  
  
"What did Jon say three nights ago?" Mark asks, feeling like he has missed an episode of the Young and the Restless and now Victor is doing something totally inexplicable.  
  
"Do you never listen to anything I say?" Violet demands. Eduardo is less judgmental, stroking Violet's hair and informing Mark, "Jon told her he might be in love with her, three nights ago at the Halloween dance."  
  
Mark actually has no idea why any statement from the teenage neanderthal called Jon bears any significance to Violet at all, but sixteen years of parenthood has taught him that if he voices that opinion, he _will_ be murdered. "Well, either he was lying then or he's lying now," he points out instead, carefully. "You don't fall out of love with someone in the span of three days."  
  
"That is  _not helpful_ ," Violet informs him, teeth gritted. She has her temples pressed between her palms, and she won't look at either of them.  
  
"Isn't it?" Mark is fairly certain that it is. "Either he was never in love with you, in which case, no big loss, or he still is and he's lying."  
  
" _You_  - " Violet is hopelessly angry and upset, and not with her father, although he is currently her outlet. "What do you know about anything?"  
  
She rises and storms out of the room. They hear nothing but Taylor Swift for the next four hours.  
  
The next morning, Mark gets up early and makes dinosaur-shaped pancakes. They have a silly stegosaurus-shaped cookie cutter that Dustin bought them forever ago, as a joke, when Violet was small. When Eduardo comes down, hair rumpled, still wearing the t-shirt he sleeps in, he smiles and slides onto a bar stool across from where Mark is cooking.  
  
"This is sweet of you," he says.  
  
Mark shrugs. "It seemed like a dinosaur kind of morning."  
  
Eduardo leans forward across the island, curling a hand into the fabric of Mark's sweatshirt and dragging him in for a kiss on the temple. Mark turns his face at the last second and meets Eduardo's lips, and Eduardo smiles into the kiss.   
  
When Violet comes downstairs perhaps five minutes later, Eduardo has stolen Mark's reading glasses and is scrolling through phone book entries on his smart phone. Violet doesn't really acknowledge the dinosaur pancakes, although she eats two and gives her father an unexpected, unexplained hug on her way out the door. Mark looks hilariously startled, and Eduardo forces himself not to laugh.  
  
\--

The next day is Friday. Violet has spent the past sixteen hours in her room again, miserable, but unbeknownst to her, the travel agent that Eduardo found in the yellow pages the previous morning has booked them three last-minute tickets to Boston. Neither Eduardo nor Mark say anything about it to their daughter as she gets up and gets ready for school. And it isn't until the end of the school day nears and they are preparing to go and pick up Violet that Mark hesitates by the front door.  
  
"Is this a good idea?"  
  
"How could it not be?" Eduardo is so, so sure of himself; his eyes are shining. "We're going to show her that everything turns out okay."  
  
They're going to tell her their story, show it to her in sweeping surround-sound and technicolour, Kirkland and Elliot and everything, everything.   
  
Mark still looks unsure, but they are twenty years in now, and if he has learned nothing else, it's that he can trust Eduardo. Besides, Violet needs some time away from everything; Mark figures that a roadtrip with your parents is the least damaging option for blowing off steam.  
  
"I hate Boston," he says, conversationally, as they get into the car.  
  
"The birthplace of Facebook?" Eduardo glances at him in the mirror as they reverse out of the driveway.  
  
"I never went back. Aside from the Winklevoss depositions, I mean." Mark looks away, out the window. "After the first summer in California. It was like I ceded it to you. Your territory."  
  
"I know." Eduardo reaches for his hand. "But we fixed this,  _querido_. Now it's going to be ours again."  
  
"I trust you," Mark says, because he does. And as they drive away, down past the end of the street, Mark maybe starts to look forward to a weekend in Boston. Sometimes, after all, things have to come full circle. And maybe it will inspire Violet. She is, after all, her fathers' daughter.

 

**Part III - In Which They Lived Happily Ever After**  


Eduardo glances at someone's living room window as they pass by for a glimpse of his own reflection, surreptitiously raising a hand to his hair and smoothing it back. He has a ten-step hair process that he follows in the morning and has for decades, but for the past few years, he's been increasingly anxious about it as his hair has gone from brown to liberally streaked with grey to entirely white. The only reason he doesn't dye it is because his own father went grey with dignity, and Eduardo thinks it would look ridiculous on a man of his age to have what would be an obvious dye job.  
  
Mark catches sight of Eduardo's expression as his hand falls back to his side, and he can't resist a jibe.   
  
"You should use super-glue, you wouldn't have to worry about doing it every day. It'd save you forty-five minutes in the morning."  
  
Eduardo looks a little sheepish, but he retorts, "It doesn't take forty-five minutes."  
  
"It didn't  _used_  to take forty-five minutes," Mark counters.  
  
"Are you suggesting that I'm slow? That I got slow in my old age?" Eduardo nudges Mark, who grins a little.  
  
"You should hire someone to do it for you."  
  
Eduardo grins back. "A live-in hair stylist? Whose only single, solitary job is to mousse my hair into submission once a day?"  
  
"It's not like you're worried about money. I seem to remember giving you six hundred million dollars at some point." They're well past the point where either of them are remotely upset about anything Facebook-related.  
  
"Oh, you and your six hundred million dollars," Eduardo says, because he hears about it all the time. "I'm going to bury you with that six hundred million dollars."  
  
"No, you're not," Mark replies.   
  
"Sure I am."  
  
"Yeah?" They turn the corner at the end of the path, and Mark takes Eduardo's arm. "I don't think the grandkids are going to be overly impressed when they see you stuffing their inheritance into the box at my funeral."  
  
"They won't be too upset, I'm just going to write you a cheque."  
  
That startles a laugh out of Mark, and the sound of it makes Eduardo smile. They slow to a stop for a moment, looking back across the park at their modest bungalow. They've being doing the odd downgrade in the past few years, because Eduardo is failing faster than Mark is, and he was the one who used to make sure their house didn't look like total slobs lived there. Mark doesn't mind living in a smaller place; it's much closer from the kitchen to the den to the bedroom than it used to be, and those are the only rooms in the house he uses anyway.  
  
"Do you want to head back?" Mark asks him, because the arm he loaned Eduardo wasn't really him being romantic; Eduardo gets tired easily nowadays.   
  
It doesn't escape him, either. "I feel like we used to be able to go further," he remarks.  
  
"Well, we did, before you turned a hundred," Mark says.  
  
"I'm seventy-nine," Eduardo retorts. "You're not exactly a teenage ingenue anymore either."  
  
"I'm seventy-seven," Mark points out. "You're an evil robber of cradles, is what you are."  
  
Eduardo makes a face at him, and Mark makes one back. They amble back the way they came, lazily poking fun at one another even as they lean into each other, just two old men content.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this collection of ridiculous drabble ("When We Got Here (We Were Young Men") is from a beautiful Elliott Brood song called, "If I Get Old".


End file.
